It’s true: I am turning into my mother. Not the gracious woman who is now in her late seventies, despite her jovial claims of being a child bride, etc. in the previous century as part of a reluctant acceptance of middle age and the inevitable passage of time. No, not her. I am not turning into my mother of today; I am turning into the mother in my head, the one who disciplined me and indoctrinated me before society deemed me old enough to be granted a political vote. The mother in my head is the monster, the exasperated, screaming mother who spewed truth to which there was no response, insolent or otherwise, if you knew what was good for you.
One of the things this mother of mine forbade my sister and I to do — and I suppose I was about eight years old when I heard this, so that Jesuit idea of “give me a child for the first seven years of its life, etc., is a bit nonsensical, really — was to utter the words “I am bored” or to even whisper to each other or mouth the word “boring”. These words were forbidden, because the maternal parent could not stand them. In fact, she detested them with a passion. Such fear was instilled in me as to the consequences of doing so that I have never been bored, and it took me until my mid-forties to pronounce something as being boring.
How on earth have I managed never to be bored? Well, for a start, the place we grew up in could be considered to be boring in the extreme, so my sister and I found ways to amuse ourselves and keep our minds occupied – as a sort of survival tactic, you understand. In other words, it would have been a fate worse than death to die of boredom.
The forbidden fruit is always the one most thoroughly studied, and therefore, in the less eventful moments of my early life, I had the leisure to examine bored and boring people closely. Let us ignore boring people for the moment (or always – it is healthier), and consider bored people.
All bored people are dissatisfied. Dissatisfied people are ungrateful about most things in life and ungrateful about life itself. They would rather choke than say thank you. If you watch carefully, the truly bored, jaded folk have to summon enormous effort and clear their throat before saying “thank you”.
Bored people have always existed. Only now, in the great wave of garbage following the Me generation, they have been validated by the sophistry that everything is defined by how the egocentric individual feels about it, and so came up with a word borrowed from the Hebrew, I believe, to described their dissatisfied and unhelpful indifference to the world around them: meh.
Observe, if you will, that they only managed to come up with one word. One word for every single boring thing. One. That is the ultimate in meh-ness. My happy little imagination sees meh imploding on itself and being swallowed up in a black hole, and before I know it I am thinking how Zen I am about how little I know about physics and the art of motorcycle maintenance even though I did read most of the book by Robert M Pirsig to which I am alluding.
In short, people who say or think meh are part of the Fuck-it generation, and I want no part of it. They are too fucking boring! That’s all I have to say about that, since I have to get back to my joyous, exciting life full of passion either for or against, and for which I am ever so grateful, thank God!
©2017 Allison Wright
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