I get so bored sometimes. I’ve been staring at this computer screen for the better part of an hour just trying to think of something to write about. I don’t know where my ideas usually come from, but it’s just not happening today. I bought this ten dollar application for my computer called Freedom, and it totally blocks out the Internet for specified amount of time. I thought, this will be great, I won’t have any distractions, I’ll get all of my writing done a lot quicker.

But the writing isn’t coming out. And I don’t have anything to do now, because I shut off the Internet. And I planned it perfectly, so that it’s only going to come back on right as I have to leave for work. So I’m just sitting here at the kitchen table tapping my feet on the floor.

What else is there to do? Maybe the Internet’s not holding me back, maybe it allows my mind to wander, to stretch to an extent that I get creative. Maybe I’ll waste an hour clicking from link to link, but maybe that inspires some base part of the creative process. Or maybe I’m just going through Internet withdrawal right now and my brain is trying to come up with nonsense reasoning of why I should have never allowed myself to shut off the Internet in the first place.

I had three cups of coffee right before I sat down. So my leg’s tapping furiously against the chair, against the floor. I’ve gotten it to such a perfect pace that my entire thigh muscle is completely bouncing up and off the bone. It’s a weird feeling, and I can only keep it up for a little while before my foot starts sliding on the kitchen tile. I lose the rhythm, I have to pull my foot back and, try as I might, I can’t find those measured beats again.

Every day around two o’clock the sun starts pouring through the kitchen window, totally blinding me to the point where I can’t even see my computer screen. It’s been kind gloomy out lately, so I’ve gotten used to being able to sit down for an extended period of time without having to move across the room avoiding the sun’s direct rays. Now it’s just coming out sporadically.

Would you consider sporadic to be a big word? I try to avoid big words. Not because I don’t like them, or don’t understand them. Sure there are tons of big words that I don’t understand. I just feel like a lot of the time it’s a trick, a way to come across as intelligent without really being intelligent. There was this kid I worked with in high school, kind of a dick but whatever, when you’re in high school and you don’t have a car yet you kind of just hang out with whoever’s around. And I worked with this kid all the time.

And he always had a way of using unnecessarily long words in totally inappropriate situations. One time this kid made a joke to our boss, but it was a really shitty joke, and it didn’t get any sort of a reaction whatsoever. And so as my boss just stares at him, the kid says, “I was being facetious.” It looked like somebody was spending a little too much time prepping for the SATs.

Facetious. Give me a break. As I went through college, as I spent a lot of time writing and editing for our school’s newspaper, I found a bunch of words that people would use over and over again for the sake of sounding smart. Words that weren’t necessary, like facetious. You could just say that you were joking around. No, people liked to use facetious. Plethora. That’s another one. Copious. Whatever, they’re words, and so I guess you’re allowed to use them, but nobody talks like that in real life. It just sounds so contrived, or made up.

Sporadic. The only reason I feel like that’s an acceptable word is, one, because I already used it, and so I don’t want to sound like a hypocrite, but two, I learned it from the movie Clueless, where they’re all studying for the SATs. And they learn the word sporadic. And then the older brother says to that girl, “Be seeing you,” and she responds, “Hope not sporadically,” and they kind of wink at each other in that haha we just used the word we just learned about.

And the reason I remember this scene so well is because they played Clueless on HBO pretty much nonstop during the early 2000s. Whatever, if you didn’t have cable, or worse, if you had cable but no HBO, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. But if you had HBO, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and so, yeah, I think sporadic is totally appropriate. I’m not being facetious. I’m being super serial. (That’s not from Clueless, that’s from South Park.)