1001 things to keep you occupied in a boring lesson

Luckily, I came ready. I've had a 12-year experience at boring lessons, and know, generally, how to handle them. Boring lessons are tricky business because you're not supposed to be bored; you're supposed to be fascinated by whatever amazing things come out of your teacher's mouth, no matter how many times you've heard it before or how little were you interested in the first place. Usually, you should also keep quiet (but not always), so you have to find occupations that:
A. Doesn't make much noise.
B. Require some kind of brain activity, so you won't fall asleep or just go numb.
C. Doesn't require too much brain activity, so that an emergency mechanism will allow you to notice if, by any chance, your teacher will say something remotely interesting (Such as, "Fish! What are you writing there?"
D. Can be done with pencil, paper and math book.

Sounds hard? You know better. You've been to school, haven't you? In my experience, the following occupations proved to be the most gratifying boring-lesson activities, sure to keep your circulation going.

Artwork : there are a few kinds of paintings that got developed over my years as a student. One of them is the full-page, escheric stairs maze: I invented it in the first grade and complicated it over time. The result is usually a very weird place, seemingly built by the guy from the House on the Rock, of hundreds of interlocking staircases, roads and bridges. They never lead anywhere. They existed just as something to walk on.

Another kind of artwork is the line art. You start by writing a single word on a blank sheet of paper. Then you go around the edges of the letters with a line, and keep spiraling them around and around endlessly, or until you run out of paper space. The results are striking. Occasionally, even if you get caught doing stuff that doesn't have any specific relation to the class's material, your teacher will be so impressed she'll forget to preach you.

Then, of course, there's the mindless squibbling all my notebooks - both then and now - are full of. I don't know what it means. When I have a pen in my hand and paper in front of me, and nothing to write, it seems to move by itself, doing odd shapes or enigmatic words, the stuff you see all around this page. Don't ask me what it means. I don't know. It's probably dreamstuff - my subconscious sprawling itself on paper, the sill thing. It's probably worth something artistically.

Then there are games. And don't you talk to me about Battleships; we get bored with that. The problem with battleships is that it's pure luck - no brainwork whatsoever, just endless combinations. G6, B2, E3, A2. Strike, miss, yawn. We did, however, spend many amusing bible lessons playing Battleships and Mines, a self-constructed combination of Battleships and Minesweeper. It was, I have to say, almost as boring as the real thing.

Then there's Numeric Mastermind, or however you choose to call this game - you and your opponent each pick a four-digit number, and try to guess the other one's numbers. If you ever want to play me a game of that, just drop me a line, I'll be happy to. I'll win. In the thousands of games we played over the years, we've developed finding the numbers into a never-fail mathematic formula; I can guess any number in six guesses tops. Try me.

For a while, in the years of highschool, I also opened a small (one man) business of stories by demand. I would get my specifications from other students, and spend a few lessons writing a few pages' story according to them, which gave birth to such classics as "Glory Clouds", "Death of a pre-known Chronicle", "The Twilight People strike again", "The un-funny story", "Desperation and Mandarine", "Sex and the Dragon", and of course, the Yuni saga. At the end of the year, most of them were collected and stored by Ray. Some others stayed at May's. I should really ask her some time what happened to them.

Much more often, however, I was doing animation: Making tiny drawings in the margins of math books and then making them move by flipping the book quickly. Classics in this field include The Football Game, Pencils, The House Painter, and of course, DragonLance. As far as I know, that's exactly how Walt Disney got started (but isn't he dead?)

And then, of course, there's chatter. Notes. Inconceivable amounts of ink were spent on this distraction, especially when me & May were sitting next to each other (which was most of the time); most teachers were pleased that we're writing so much. Stupid teachers.

Then, you can also read a book.