Today in the paper I read a review of a dance production which produced in the reviewer “vague and intermitten boredom.” Of course this idea, this stupid idea of “vague boredom”, which doesn’t exist, sent me back immediately twenty years, to my first high school English course, where I felt not “vague boredom” but an acute, earthshaking, presexual but otherwise orgasmic boredom for the first time in my life. This horribly painful boredom has fixed forever in my mind the position of my seat in the class, the click back of the clock hand before it moved forward, the long gray beard of my professor, and the shining blond hair of the teacher’s favorite student as she passed among us, handing out the papers for her special project—an experiment, naturally, in which her classmates were consumed by the flames of boredom. I was ecstatic with boredom, and, burned by boredom, I came as close as I have ever come to breaking free from all social constraints, to finishing, finally, with the thoughts and concerns and judgments of those around me, to standing, as I longed to stand, as I burned to stand, and screaming a wordless scream from the bottom of my soul. I was so bored.