Today I read that Gen X’ers are well-suited to tolerating boredom. While generalizations about entire generations are pretty much always flawed, it is true that our generation spanned a time when mothers went to work but after-school programs and daycares had not quite caught up yet. My brother and I started coming home to an empty house around ages 11 and 9 respectively. And yeah, we were bored and had to find stuff to do. Today every one of our society’s “non-essentials” are bored and having to find stuff to do. Here in California we are in our second weekend of mandated isolation. A Saturday seems so vast in a vacant, eerily large sort of way. The boys (aka Jon and Axel) are becoming FIFA 2020 experts, presumably along with the rest of the soccer gaming world. I have taken the craft of folding laundry to a meditative art form. But even then, there is just such an enormous quantity of spare time. We get creative. Axel and I started a garden last weekend, sowing kale, turnips