Excess Capacity

Ever find yourself bored - excess mental capacity up the wing wang and nothing to do? Here are a few suggestions to excise that boredom:

1. Sign up for Wordsmith's Word of the Day and bring a little texture to your speech. Here's a word to start you off: schadenfreude - deriving delight from someone elses misery. (Like when you snicker at someone who tripped on the sidewalk. Admit it, you've done it before.)

2. Learn to bake a pie. I prefer strawberry-rhubarb, thank you very much.

3. Paint a picture and then convince people that it's abstract art, not a lack of talent.

4. Start a Blog!

5. Apply to grad school on a whim. Come on, everyone else is doing it. You don't want to be the only kid on the block without an MA/MS/MBA/JD/MD/PhD/MPH/MSW/EdD/MFA and $100K of low interest debt, do you? Do you?

6. Run for city council!

7. Write a self-serving, thinly veiled fiction/semi-autobiographical novel about how difficult it was growing up in America as a woman/person of color/first or second generation immigrant/learning disabled/child of a divorce/appalachian or southern born/poor/excessively rich/physically disabled/mixed-race/got two mammas (or pappas)/child prodigy/child with a famous, abusive or distant parents and how this left you emotionally stunted, confused and ultimately led down a path which included drug abuse, spousal abuse, and living penniless in a ditch on 39th St. and 10th Ave during the economic recssion of 1980 until you found god or a kind prostitute and now you are a fully-realized human being with 5 children (two of which are Chinese adoptees) and live a simple life with the reformed prostitute in a bamboo house you built yourself on a private island off of Fiji. Watch as the novel is heralded by various enclaves of disenfranchised populations but never creeps past #958 on the National book sellers list.

8. Grew up white, male, middle class, two parents, and well-adjusted? No problem! Write said novel anyway, get it all wrong, still recieve critical accolades for attempting to write a novel with empathy and compassion and win Pulitzer Prize. (Who ever said I was politically correct?)

9. Make a video audition tape for a reality TV show.

10. Drink the recommended eight 8oz glasses of water and then go to the bathroom every 10 minutes for the next 5 hours.

I promise I'll be in a far more serious mood next time around. I think it might have been the doughnut I had this morning.