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Things to do when you really ought to be doing something else. "Reading this" has to be pretty high on any list I make, but I'll miss it off because it's pretty self-evident. Okay, so here, and this is pretty much off the top of my head, are some great things to do when you should be doing something else, or perhaps you have an appointment looming. I dunno. 1) Tidy up. Always number one in anyone's list of displacement activities. A quick round of shoving stuff in cupboards or your wardrobe can, quite without warning, devolve into an ugly frenzy of vacuuming, washing-up and even dusting and polishing. It's when you reach the last stage- polishing - that you need to ask yourself some serious questions. First of all, of course, is "Am I a houseproud parent?". If the answer to that is "Yes", this is not a displacement activity, it comes with the turf, get over it. If the answer to that is "No", next is "Am I a natural slob?". If the answer to this is "Yes", then you've gone too far. Way too far. Implicit in the question is the further question "Am I at/have I recently left university?", and if you're a student who dusts and polishes.... Look, just find some nice people to talk to, okay? Get out of the house. Now. Run. If the answer is still "No", then ask yourself this final question: "Did I specifically buy the polish for this purpose, or was it just lying around the house?" If you bought it for this specific purpose, well, it's desperate and you may want to think about actually doing the thing you're putting off. If it was just lying around, then you're probably fine and have done it before. 2) Cook.
And here I don't mean microwave a Chicago Town pizza or boil the kettle for a Pot Noodle. What I mean here is a conscious effort to make some nice food. Like, say, baking some bread. Baking bread is a classic displacement activity because it requires an awful lot of the chef. I mean, you have to mix up the dough, knead it, let it prove, bake it... it's not an easy job, is it? And it takes ages; of course, you need to find a displacement activity to keep you occupied while the dough proves, but you can get those bags of bread mix in Sainsbury's nowadays that hardly take any time at all. The thing with bread making is that you know when it's time to give it up; it's at exactly the point you think "Oh, I think I should get one of those bread makers". Don't get the bread maker. They cost a bomb and, what's more, the bastard things make it easier and quicker to make bread, which is totally against the ethos of displacement. If you're that desperate, get a job in a bakery. Sorry, this one ended up being about bread, didn't it? 3) Go to the shops. But this doesn not mean "Shop". Actually, I think "Don't shop" might be a better way of putting it. Or possibly "Window Shop". This one only really works for those folks who live in or near a city. It's not quite the same to walk a quarter of a mile to the village newsagents to window shop. You'll just end up looking at licorice whips and copies of the Star, which don't quite impart any vicarious thrills of prospective ownership. No, you really have to have a city. Strap on your walkman (Nb. most displacement activities can be made more fun with the addition of music, making some kind of personal stereo system a must) and troll into the town centre. But DON'T BUY ANYTHING! This is important. If you start buying stuff, then you're shopping and not just out amongst the shops because you can't think of anything better to be doing. Watch people shop (and possibly snigger quietly at their purchases; especially if you sometimes feel someone is doing this to you. At least you know what goes around comes around), look at things on the higher shelves (Where they put the expensive stuff, well, in supermarkets anyway) and generally just wander about. Go on. Treat yourself to looking at that suede jacket you always wanted to look at. 4) Alphabetise stuff One of the more precise displacement activities, Alphabetising Stuff is fairly self-explanatory; take anything which is categorisable; such as your record, video (and, of course, I include DVD in this column, but whatever you do - don't mix your DVDs in with your VHS! That would be wrong, and the cases would be all weird-looking sizes), or game collection and organise it according to its name, or the name of the creator. While this latter category may be fairly straightforward for your CDs, tapes, records, minidiscs or whatever you have, it can be the source of a good deal of entertainment when it gets to videos - after all, who the "creator" of a movie is can be a point of much debate, especially depending on your personal perspective. Is it the director, the producer... the writer? Some may even sort according to star, though I would gently discourage this, especially if you often have directors around for tea. They can get touchy. And by the time you get to computer games - including console games, natch - it can be a nightmare to sort them out. Best to do that by title, to be honest. This also seems like tidying up; after all, if your CDs are spread haphazardly over the floor then it's a good idea to sort them into neat piles (and finding the right CD for the right case - be prepared to have lost a couple of CDs for no readily explicable reason, by the way. This always happens when you sort them out. It's like a trigger). 5) Make compilation tapes This is a great one to do straight after Alphabetising your music collection. You'll know immediately where everything is and be in a mood to listen to things you'd ignored for a while (probably because they were in a dusty corner in the wrong slipcase, but that's by-the-by now). Compilation tapes have excellent longevity when it comes to displacement; first of all, you need to pick a mood, or a theme - All slow ones? Racy? - then decide which tracks to use. Then you have to record them all, and this takes forever, because you can't just go off and do something else. You have to stay by the machine and stop the tape at exactly the right point. Then rewind a bit in an effort to mix the tracks seamlessly, or at least make a half-arsed attempt to eliminate that "fwump" noise you usually get between tracks, especially if the last time the tape heads were cleaned was when Thatcher was Prime Minister. Then you have to do the inlay card. If you're lucky enough to have a decent computer and printer, I advise doing them on that, especially as you can then save the track list and avoid duplication should you put together another compliation for the same person at a later date (there's nothing worse than the recipient saying something like "Oh, no, you've put 'Back For Good' by Take That on it again!"). Which is fairly likely, as most compilation tapes are done for boyfriends/girlfriends. 6) Lose your keys.
Actually, this may be a misplacement activity, and hence in the wrong place entirely. |
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