Convoluted Living

Boredom, Eternal Return

How does one recognize boredom? There are at least two types of boredom: reflexive, and reflective. Reflexive boredom is unconscious--it is a restlessness that seeks occupation. In other words, it is a mind that seeks confinement in some external routine--an escape from itself. Reflective boredom requires an opportunity and a capacity to recognize that one is bored, to consider the reasons for this boredom. It is equivocal; in this state, one is never completely sure that one is actually bored (having nothing to do is no longer so easy: just recognizing boredom is an action that might reverse it). Through this ambiguity it severs its connections with external expectation (of an antidote), and the boredom becomes a mirror. Suddenly the environment that one inhabits stops being an other in a dialogue, and instead becomes a projection in a monologue: One turns one's house into one's own.
Squatting arises from this kind of boredom--the boredom that instigates a return to oneself, both of oneself, and of one's environment. In incorporating the environment, the squatter takes responsibility for it. And as one body, the squatter-and-his/her-environment no longer relies on a feeding tube, but generates his/her/its own food. Reflective boredom is a revolving doorway to self-reliance and self-sufficiency.

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"The readable transforms itself into the memorable [...] the viewer reads the landscape of his childhood in the evening news [...] A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place." De Certeau, Michel. 'The Practice of Everyday Life.' The Consumption Reader. 259-65.

"Rather than relying on use-by dates to tell them what food is edible and safe, freegans use their innate senses of touch, taste and smell. This attitude marks a conscious shift away from corporate control enabling the diver to reclaim a connection to their senses and to the natural world." Edwards, Ferne and Mercer, David (2007) 'Gleaning from Gluttony: an Australian youth subculture confronts the ethics of waste', Australian Geographer, 38:3, 279 - 96.

Squatting and dumpster diving (related through both ethics and culture) are turning inward, transitively and intransitively. In consuming non-consumable food (food that lacks a sponsor), one 'returns to one's senses.' Likewise, inhabiting an uninhabited, (conventionally) uninhabitable building is 'reinterpreting' it as habitable. All of this involves rereading an article as something more familiar (personal), more present, and more functional.