Tuesday, December 30, 2008

The Post About Nothing

Nothing is awesome.


I'm sitting on the couch with my 10 year-old nephew James, and I asked him what I should blog about. He told me that I should blog about nothing. When I asked him to further clarify, he said my first sentence should be what I wrote above. So here we go, writing about nothing (Seinfeld-style).

Why do they call it Ovaltine? The jar is round, why don't they call it "Roundtine?"
Huh. I think that bit may have already been done.

I'd have to say that I enjoy Doing Nothing. Not all the time, just from time to time. Here's a picture of James and me sitting on the couch Doing Nothing:
Really, when you're Doing Nothing, you're actually doing Something. It's like trying to have complete silence; you can't actually be completely quiet, or else you'd be dead. I think that Doing Nothing is more along the lines of whether or not whatever it is that you are Doing is Meaningful or Worthwhile. In that picture above, James was (and still is) playing Super Marios Brothers on the DS, and I was playing Taipei on my computer. Is that worthwhile? It's fun and relaxing, but where does that get us in life? One hour further on, is all.
I think that the masters of Doing Nothing are Calvin & Hobbes. While Calvin tends to slide his way through life with the help of his pal, Hobbes, he truly knows how to relax and Do Nothing. And he's creative about it! I think we can learn a lesson from their Doing of Nothingness - do we rush around focusing so much on all of the Somethings that we have to do that we fail to take time to do Nothing? Doing Nothing is an important part of our lives - it's like a palette cleanser between meals or Kazimir Malevich's White on White in a Jackson Pollack museum (a breather between zaniness!).

So I recommend to you all to take a moment, stop with all the Somethings you've got going on, and Do a Little Nothing. You may just accomplish something great! For example, James just beat Super Mario Brothers! With 73 lives to spare!! Now that's Something.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

so this post is about nihilism!? Awesome! That's really what Seinfeld was about too! Awesome post!

MMMegan said...

Wow. It's just like John Cage's piece he wrote called 4'33". The piece consists of 4 minutes 33 seconds of the player doing nothing. The whole point was to prove that there is no such thing as silence and that performances are made up of much more than the music.

Elizabeth Downie said...

I really like the picture of Patrick crossing "nothing" off his list! lol

Joyce and Bill said...

Katherine, you have a great blog!! I saw some recent research that indicated that Italians enjoy doing nothing and can't understand Americans who always need to be doing something. :-)
And its smart of you to listen to 10 year olds. Kids are so perceptive. One of my work friends in Montana told me about coming home from work and finding her 8 year old sitting at the breakfast bar very dejected with his head in his hands. She ask him, "Hon, what is wrong?" And he said, "Mom, I'm in total puberty!" Shocked, she managed to squeek out, "Do you know what that means?" And he said, "Yes, I don't have a cent to my name." :-) Even 8 year olds have money problems.
B.C.