I have a recurring event on my Google calendar every Friday at 5pm, a reminder to myself to “Review your weekend plans.” Not that I schedule every minute of my weekends, but without being at least somewhat deliberate it’s far too easy for my “free time” to simply evaporate, and I end up starting the next workweek obsessing about undone chores and wasted potential.
Because I have come to realize that regular creative work is good for my mental health, one of the things the event’s reminder email prompts me to do is “make a creativity plan” for the weekend. Usually that just means figuring out a couple of hours to work on this newsletter, and often making a plan of where to do it — often at a coffee shop, which then gets me out of the house and walking.
Last weekend, however, I decided I wanted to get back to painting, which I started dabbling in during the COVID-19 lockdown. As I wrote in 2021, “Painting felt freeing, possibly because it was one of the first endeavors I’ve engaged in as an adult that was not for other people.”
I’m not very good at it, so I have learned that if I’m going to do it, I need to schedule some time to just change into my painting clothes, put on some music, maybe make some coffee (which, if I am successful in engaging myself in the process, will mostly go cold, undrunk), and sit down in front of my brushes and paints and the cardboard I use for canvasses. When I sit down to write, it’s very easy for me to push everything else out of my mind, but with painting, I have to push everything else out of my mind first.
So I put several three-hour blocks on my Google calendar, titled “PAINT!” ... and yet did not find myself dipping a brush into paint until almost noon on Sunday.
When I was a child, my most frequent complaint, delivered in a sing-song-y whine I can still remember, was “Mo-ommm, I’m bo-ooored!”
As I remember, my mother would patiently respond with suggestions of things I could do, but, at least when she said them, they would rarely be the exact thing that I wanted to do in that moment. Of course, the problem was that I didn’t know exactly what the exact thing that I wanted to do in that moment was — or perhaps I knew, and for some reason (friends or adults not being available, it being the wrong season, the weather, etc.) I couldn’t do that exact one thing. And so I would continue the whining.
Eventually, presumably, I would settle for something — pick up a book (I was a voracious reader), draw, play with Legos, whatever. But the memory of that longing for a one exact, perfect thing, a thing that perhaps didn’t even exist, is burned much deeper into my brain than the memory of the contentment I found once I finally settled.
I spent most of Saturday lying on the couch. To be fair, this was in no small part because I ran nine miles in the morning — the most I had run since my half marathon in early May — and I ran them at quite a fast pace, wearing myself out. I knew I had planned to PAINT!, but I just couldn’t find the motivation.
The last several years have seen a spate of articles about the link between boredom and creativity. This relatively early one from the BBC in 2020, which explicitly links the topicality of boredom to the experience of lockdown, includes this advice from novelist Neil Gaiman:
When asked what advice he would give aspiring writers, Neil Gaiman said: “You have to let yourself get so bored that your mind has nothing better to do than tell itself a story.”
The problem for anyone who wishes to be creative, of course, is that we are now all carrying around anti-boredom devices in our pockets. Even though I have more or less removed all social media apps from my phone in the last few months, I still find myself picking the damn thing up, looking for that hit of dopamine from the response of a touchscreen to my finger, justifying the fix by doing something “useful” (looking at the weather forecast, copying yesterday’s step total from the health app into my fitness log on Google Sheets, etc.). While I don’t get sucked into the endless scrolling of the social media apps, it relieves my boredom just enough that when I put the phone down I re-enter that vague state of waiting for some exact thing to present itself, not yet bored enough to settle for something I know that I enjoy.
Medieval philosophy distinguishes between the “haecceity,” or “this-ness,” of a thing, and its “quiddity,” or “what-ness.” A thing’s haecceity is the collection of aspects which make it itself, a unique, particular thing, while its quiddity is the aspects which make it part of a category. The quiddity of the tree that grew in front of my childhood home on Maine1 Street in Lawrence, Kansas, for example, includes, most obviously, being a tree. But also the loss of its leaves every fall marked it as deciduous, and the roughness of its bark, the shape of its leaves, and the soft seed-strands that fell softly in early summer (and probably contributed to my childhood allergies) marked it as a cottonwood.
Its haecceity, on the other hand, includes the way its rough bark felt when I would lean up against it, my memories of seeing cotton float down like snow in May and June, the fact that it was the tallest tree on our block and I desperately wanted to climb it, and its complete lack of lower-level limbs that would allow me to do so. And the fact that it is no longer there.
The things on our phones that distract us have haecceity, of course — all things do — but it is a thin haecceity. One distracted boyfriend meme is much like any other — indeed, much of what we revel in about viewing those memes is their quiddity, the fact that someone has created yet another mildly amusing way for us to re-experience the what-ness of the generic meme. When we re-post them, we join the category of “people who have reposted this meme,” and we are all saying more or less the same thing: “I found this mildly amusing and I think you might too.”
On the other hand, if one were to, Duchamp-like, print a particular distracted boyfriend meme six feet high and nine feet wide and mount it in a durable way and place it in an art gallery or museum, it would — I would argue — acquire a far deeper haecceity. Viewing it in that context, one would be confronted more intensely with its this-ness — why did someone choose this particular version? Who chose it? What are they trying to say? Did they find some deep meaning in the meme itself, or is finding something mildly amusing enough reason to create a large-scale physical print of it? If they sell it, will they pay royalties to the person who created the meme, or to the actors in the stock photo upon which it is based, or to the original photographer?
When I was a kid nagging my mom, I was in some sense looking for her to provide me with a ready-made haecceity, a singular this that would flood my boredom receptors with interestingness, and all she was offering me was quiddities, a selection of whats from which I would have to choose, pick one up and fill it with the specifics of that day in that house, indeed of that me, the person I was in that particular instant who would be transformed, at least a little bit, by whatever I ended up reading, drawing, building, into a new me. And boredom was the only way to get there.
(Though I wish I hadn’t nagged my mom so much. Sorry, mom!)
A couple of past Domestic Lefts where I wrote about my forays into the visual arts:
I’m not really a fan of marijuana, but I found this young woman’s unapologetic defense of smoking weed all day, every day both charming and hilarious. An excerpt:
Last week my therapist asked me what it’s like being this kind of low-level stoned all day, and honestly I just feel more appreciative of details that are beautiful, and less affected by details that are petty and unimportant. It makes me feel less anxious, and I don’t get frustrated at people in traffic, which is a useful skill when you live in LA.
Facebook memories reminded me the other day that six years ago I was reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling. Apparently I was so taken by a passage where he compares the hyper-rational layout of Paris’s arrondissements unfavorably with London’s less systematic approach that I posted a photo of the book’s text along with a comment to the effect of “This is why I love living in Pittsburgh so much.” This sentence pretty much sums it up:
I have come to appreciate with the passing years that being unsystematic gives life a richness and unpredictability that endows even the simplest undertakings with an air of challenge and uncertainty.
I haven’t actually written it yet, but I thought I would let folks know that I’ll be writing a short piece for the newsletter of the fantastic podcast Fragile Juggernaut, which is exploring the history and meaning of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
The CIO, for people who aren’t familiar with it, was the federation of industrial unions (including my union, UE) which successfully organized basic industry (auto, steel, electrical manufacturing, meatpacking, rubber, etc.) in the 1930s and 40s. It merged with the American Federation of Labor in 1955 to create the AFL-CIO, but in its twenty years of independent existence (it was founded in 1935) it represented the most profound challenge to capitalist power in American history — as partial and contradictory as that challenge was.
The podcast is great — I wrote about it in March for the UE NEWS — and the latest episode discusses the different political tendencies within the CIO (with UE representing the left, naturally). You can listen on, as they say, your favorite podcast app — just search for “Fragile Juggernaut” — but the newsletter is a special benefit for their financial supporters. So, if you can spare five bucks a month to support a worthwhile project, head over to patreon.com/FragileJuggernaut and sign up at the “American Labor Party” level or above, and you’ll get their next newsletter in your inbox.
Not a typo. The north-south streets in the original grid of Lawrence are named for states, in the order in which they were admitted to the Union — Maine lies between Alabama Street to the east and Missouri Street to the west. Our “main” downtown street is Massachusetts Street.
I like this new painting development! Also, the whole bit about haecceity and quiddity and how you applied it to that boyfriend meme. I too, like this variation.