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Broke Wife, Big City
The importance
of being boring
By Aprill Brandon
It doesn’t happen all at once. I suppose that’s why it happens to so
many people. It just tends to sneak up on you. And by the time you
realize what’s happening, it’s already too late.
Suddenly, you’re boring.
I should know. I have completely morphed into the most boring person
alive (even including that guy I met seven years ago who started every
sentence with “Well, actually,” and thought a three hour diatribe about
how much he hated George Lucas—while wearing a “Star Wars” T-shirt,
mind you –was an appropriate response to the question “Hey, how are
you?”).
Granted, the very idea of “boring” is relative. What you find boring
and what I find boring could be vastly different. For instance, the few
times I have accidentally watched sports is only because alcohol tends
to hang out wherever sports are happening. And I’m the kind of devoted
drinker that will pretend to care about nine burly men in ridiculously
tight pants if it means society will give me a free pass to get drunk
at two in the afternoon.
And you, for example, may find books boring. Or fancy cheese. Or
Saturday Night Live. Meanwhile, my life goal is to find a job that just
lets me read all day while eating fancy cheese and the only time I’m
interrupted is when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler take Instagram selfies of
the three of us every hour with the hashtag “Best Friends Forever.”
Legend has it there are even people out there who find math exciting.
Yes. Math. That thing with all the numbers but also, cruelly, letters
and tiny hieroglyphics. But just like so many other legends, their
existence is hard to proof (but if you look hard enough, there are
cosines of them everywhere).
Sorry. I’ll stop being so acute. Math puns are a sine of a big problem.
Never drink and derive, kids.
But the kind of boring I’m talking about, the kind of boring I have
turned into, is universal. It’s the kind of boring you become once you
have a baby. And while our society may be fractured on pretty much
every topic imaginable, we can all agree at least that parents of young
children are just the worst.
We are utterly obsessed with our children. They are all we think about.
They are all we talk about. And they are all we think everyone else in
the world wants to think and talk about.
Granted, in our defense, nature makes us this way because it knows that
only an obsessed person could find the energy to pull a kid away from
the computer cord 200 times a day, every day, without their head
exploding. But that biological explanation is a poor consolation prize
for the innocent barista I cornered for 27 minutes with my rambling
monologue on how my son used to love bananas and now he hates them.
And the worst part is that we don’t even care that we’ve become boring.
We don’t care that the only thing we can contribute to a discussion
about Netflix shows is that Ricky Gervais was on an episode of “Sesame
Street” and it made you laugh so hard that you scared little junior. Or
that the last book you read was “Let’s Go To The Baby Animal Farm!” And
you actually LIKED it. Or that the only political opinion you have
these days is that someone should probably be elected president but
here, look at this rash on my baby’s butt…do you think it’s regular
diaper rash or something more serious?
Oh my god, we are so boring. Which is why you see us parents of young
children hanging out in clans. We’re the only ones who can put up with
each other. And even then, we are secretly hoping Brenda shuts up about
her stupid kid soon so we can talk about our own vastly superior kid.
The good news is that this too shall pass. The kids will get older and
become more independent and with that freed up space in our brain that
used to be occupied by cutting the crusts off approximately one million
sandwiches, we will remember that we used to be a person too. A person
with interests and hobbies and dreams and poop stain-free pants.
Yes, someday we parents will become people again.
But until then, you totally think it’s weird that my baby no longer
likes bananas too, right? I mean, what’s up with that?
Can’t get enough of Aprill? Can’t wait until next week?
Check out her website at http://aprillbrandon.com/
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