{"id":1505,"date":"2006-05-02T00:12:49","date_gmt":"2006-05-02T07:12:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2006\/05\/02\/boredom-as-rite-of-passage\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:43:54","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:43:54","slug":"boredom-as-rite-of-passage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2006\/05\/02\/boredom-as-rite-of-passage\/","title":{"rendered":"Boredom As Rite of Passage"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>What Dr. Ralley is forgetting, of course, is that whether or not you get taken to Alton Towers and fed chocolate on a Good Friday, childhood is and will always be full of the most unbreachable, yawning, demonic chasms of pure boredom &#8211; there you are, minding your own business, and your mum says, &#8220;Do you want to come to the shops?&#8221;. You think, &#8220;Why not, it&#8217;ll break up the day a bit, and maybe there&#8217;s a Curly Wurly in it for me,&#8221; and you&#8217;re innocently trotting alongside her, you might be holding her hand, when bam. She meets some &#8220;friend&#8221;; they barely even sodding know each other; they decide to rectify this by talking for 40 minutes, except that, of course, since they hardly know each other, they&#8217;re talking rubbish. And that&#8217;s before you factor in advert breaks, which are unbearably tedious for children, and baths, whose interest palls after the thorough cleaning of two or three digits.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Zoe Williams, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/g2\/story\/0,,1753724,00.html\">In Praise of Boredom<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is a fun little essay. Go read it all!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What Dr. Ralley is forgetting, of course, is that whether or not you get taken to Alton Towers and fed chocolate on a Good Friday, childhood is and will always be full of the most unbreachable, yawning, demonic chasms of pure boredom &#8211; there you are, minding your own business, and your mum says, &#8220;Do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotes","category-social-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12290,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions\/12290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}