Yes, there is a world more boring than Instagram: moving – and your cable bill
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Version 0 of 1. I am moving next week, and the first thing to get lost, in this situation – before the spare keys, the instructions for the air-conditioner and any loose mail lying around – is a sense of perspective. Can I tell you about it? Please? It is one of the few experiences in life that triggers an almost primordial need to subject those around us to a minute-by-minute replay of every decision, consideration and uncertainty it entails. These are trivial events, but they are also the things we go on, and on, and on about, to the point of exhaustion and almost certainly in an effort to avoid something else. Minor surgery is one. Marathon training is another. And the motherlode – the house move: I have run out of bubble-wrap and desperately need you to hear about it. The question of what constitutes boring changed somewhat when we all got access to personal publishing platforms – to share likes and buttons and passing thoughts in the day – and so most of us are still re-learning the art of self-censorship. Train delays, regular work-out sessions and what has become the emblem of social media misuse – what you had for lunch – are understood, by and large, to be for those with inadequate filters, as are photos posted to Instagram of anything short of man walking on water. But there are some subjects that provoke such all-consuming rage, such obsessive self-regard, that it is impossible to leave them alone. Traditionally, consumer rights issues have been a trigger for this compulsive over-sharing. Perhaps you have spent time on the phone trying to make sense of your cable bill? The only relief, after an audience with Time Warner Cable, is to pass on the abuse to your nearest and dearest, reliving the experience in longer-than-real-time, with many asides and unplanned Tourette’s outbursts. Or trivial health issues that, in their foreshadowing of more serious decline, grip us like nothing else. Last year, I had a minor eye thing that required the doctor to inject local anaesthetic into both my eyelids and, in terms of the mileage I got out of it, I couldn’t have enjoyed it more. These things are proxies, of course: for general anxiety, or as covert pleas for praise, reassurance, love or attention. The novelist Amy Bloom, who used to be a psychotherapist, once told me that after many weeks of a client talking obsessively about his Yorkshire Terrier’s breathing difficulties (pets: that’s another one) she snapped and told him, “You know, sometimes people are aggressively boring because they don’t want to talk about what’s on their mind.” Likewise, when Russell Crowe tweets about yet another completed 40km run, one assumes that, at some level, he is on about something else entirely. (Mind you, the interior life of Crowe is perhaps a mystery best left undisturbed.) Moving, it is said, is up there with death and divorce as one of life’s great unsettlers, and as such, all restraints are off. I ordered 20 book boxes from U-Haul, but you know what? I think I needed 30. What’s the conventional wisdom on transporting the contents of one’s fridge? Would you move unopened butter? The Manhattan movers are building in two hours of transport time, so although they come with a better recommendation, I’m going with the Brooklyn quote because, hey, you’re still with me, right? I have hours more of this to work through. The live-feed from one’s brain is appalling in these circumstances, and although, in rare moments, one can turn around and see it, it is almost impossible to stop. It is the price we pay for intimacy; you listen to my guff, and I, in turn, reciprocate when your iPhone breaks, or you have the builders in, or you make minor amendments to your training schedule. It’s boring, of course. But it’s the boring stuff that is in some ways most valuable; the protective wrapping that allows us to move. |