Killing time

Fifty ways to keep from going stir-crazy

By Chris Wright

LATE JANUARY. THE whole world’s coated with a flinty shell of ice. To set foot outside your door is to risk a bone-shattering pratfall or a blood-plundering bout of flu. So you stay indoors. You watch Law & Order and you eat. You watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch and eat more. Suddenly, without really knowing how you got there, you are a fat, lonely, bitter person.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Find a project to work on. Get a hobby. Improve yourself. Most of all, stay active. There are a thousand fun and fulfilling things you can do around the house if you’d only get off your backside and do them. Here, then, is a regimen of five daily activities to keep yourself occupied through these long, grueling winter months.

Day 1

• Learn a craft. Make scented candles or decorative paper.

• Cook yourself a healthy meal. Explore different ethnic cuisines.

• When you feel like a snack, exercise instead. Do sit-ups, push-ups, calisthenics.

• Think of a book you’ve always meant to read but never had the time for. Force yourself to read it.

• Throw a ball into the middle of the floor. Pick it up. Repeat.

Day 2

• Calculate how much money you’d make if you sold everything in your house.

• Go through the phone book and write down every name that sounds vaguely rude.

• Mime the national anthem.

• Try to brush your teeth without using your hands.

• Break a lamp and make up an interesting story about how it got broken.

Day 3

• Position yourself in front of a blank TV screen so you can see your reflection. Pretend you’re on an episode of Friends.

• Drill a hole in a stick of butter.

• Find 20 things in your apartment that could conceivably be smoked.

• Write an overly familiar letter to your congressman.

• Practice your sly grin.

Day 4

• Call up Domino’s Pizza and ask if they fancy a game of dominos.

• Find a hand-held mirror and look at a part of yourself you’ve never seen before. Give the part a name. Make up a song about it.

• Find a blank book and compose a fictional daily diary for the past three years.

• Think of something clever you’d say to Warren Beatty if you met him.

• Put on every pair of pants you own at the same time. Clock yourself as you try to take a pee.

Day 5

• Thrash around in the bathtub screaming, “Shark!”

• Pluck your eyebrows and glue them back on again.

• Sandpaper the peel off a banana.

• Draw a picture of something that doesn’t exist.

• Beat yourself at Monopoly and refuse to talk to yourself for a couple of hours.

Day 6

• Press your face up against a window and yell, “I’m stuck!”

• Call up Guinness World Records Ltd. and tell them you want to set the record for Most Calls to Guinness World Records. When they hang up, call them back.

• Learn how to bowl using eggs.

• Track and capture a cockroach. Try to determine its sex.

• Perfect your sigh.

Day 7

• Pick up the phone and dial your own number. If you get an answer, hang up.

• Translate the Bible into Morse code.

• Try to remember the very first
date you ever went on. Think about what you should have done differently.

• Call your landlord and tell him you’ve moved.

• Using only things you find around the kitchen, try to kill a houseplant.

Day 8

• Get a cooking pot, turn it upside down, and bang it with a spoon until the police arrive.

• Come up with 10 facts that refute the existence of a Higher Being.

• Write a one-act play with a spider as the main character. Perform it for a spider.

• Call a technical-support hotline and confess your sins.

• Stand on your bathroom scale and watch your weight go down.

Day 9

• Pretend you have a dog. Imagine the dog has died. Mourn.

• Get into a fistfight with yourself.

• Carve the name of your first love into a block of cheese. Eat it.

• Find somewhere to hide. Stay there until somebody reports you missing.

• Try to swallow a towel.

Day 10

• Write a love letter to yourself. Tear it up before you read it.

• Jump up and down on a copy of the New York Times.

• Weep uncontrollably.

• Look in the mirror. Tell yourself you’re being silly.

• Repeat.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright@phx.com.