When I really need excitement, when I cant wait for things to happen, I buy some fresh bananas and watch them turn brown: there's a couple of weeks of solid entertainment.

Over my head in my cubicle at school there are accoustic tiles, about twenty inches square, with odd cuneiform holes punched in them an a totally random pattern. Interspersed among the cuneiform holes are tiny pinpricks. I've been wondering if I could stand the excitement of counting the larger holes, then the smaller ones, in one of the tiles over my head. I'm not sure how to make the count accurate without getting up and marking each hole as I count it; as I said before, the pattern seems quite random. As an offhand guess, I'd suppose each tile has maybe a thousand of the larger holes and a like number, perhaps fifty percent more, of the smaller holes, so actually counting them and marking them should take an hour, at least, per tile. There are 32 tiles on the ceiling (there would be 38 but the places of two of them are occupied by flourescent fixtures), so even if I had equal access to each of the tiles, to count and mark the holes, it would take me about 32 hours (I can't count one and multiply by 32, because, as I said, the patterns appear random, so there's no guarantee that the count from tile to tile will be even close, let alone identical). And, of course, knowing how mistakes can be made, the first time I counted them I could use a yellow marker to identify those I'd already counted; the second time, to make sure, I'd use a light blue marker--and, since it's likely that my counts would not agree, I'd have to count them a third time, this time marking them with pink. This would still leave a mark light enough that you, if you were concerned about the accuracy of my count, could mark them with black as you counted them.

The wall I just watched as the paint dried faces south and gets sun for many hours per day. One of these slow decades I can sit and watch it as the paint cracks from the constant sunlight, and as the cracks widen and the paint begins to flake off.

As you can see, I will never lack for entertainment.

--seed